Top 5 Things to Remember When Launching Your Kentico Site

Congratulations! You just completed development of your brand new Kentico website and all you have left to do is launch it…

Before you make this commitment you might want to take a moment and review the following list to ensure that you are launching a site that is both secure and ready to be fully optimized for digital marketing, post-launch.

1. Secure Site Users

This is one of the most overlooked and dangerous items people miss when they launch a new Kentico site. A fresh Kentico install will create several back-end users with varying levels of permissions (all depending on the edition of Kentico that has been installed) that by default do not have a password set. Unless you are aware of these users and either delete them or change their passwords, you will have effectively given anyone backend access when you put the site in production! As an added precaution, you should set a minimum password length policy on your website, so any new users that are created don’t unintentionally create additional security holes down the road.

2. Optimize Performance

If properly managed, Kentico can be fine-tuned for optimal page load performance. Here are a few tricks that will help your site load faster.

Disable Debugging. The debugging tools provided by Kentico can be extremely helpful when building out a site or when needing to try to isolate a specific issue, but they are always running in the background and using up resources unless they are turned off.

Optimize Repeaters. One of the great features of Kentico is the ability to create any kind of custom content types and configure a repeater to render the content out in different views. Repeater controls can and should be configured to only query the fields necessary to render a particular view.

Use Output Caching. This allows Kentico to cache full pages in memory so it does not have to pull a fresh copy of the data each time the page is requested. This technique is best used on pages that do not change content frequently or load dynamic data. Output caching can be managed site-wide or on a per-page basis with Kentico.

3. Extensionless Urls

Kentico by default still configures its pages to load with the .aspx extension. It’s not very pretty to view, nor is it very fun to pronounce. Thankfully, Kentico has made it easy to configure all of your pages to be viewable and accessible without an extension. It will also update any Urls that are dynamically generated to use the extensionless version (for example the Menu Web Parts). Any page is still accessible if accessed with its full extension.

4. Versioning Workflow

There will likely come a time after launching your Kentico website when you will be building out a page by adding and configuring Web Parts and content. Let’s say that something goes horribly wrong and you begin to wish you could turn the clock back and start over. While Kentico has versioning for all kind of things (page templates, layouts, transformations, etc.) – if you want to apply versioning to a Page itself, you need to have a Workflow defined. The Basic Versioning workflow is created out of the box with Kentico, but it won’t take effect until you apply a “Scope” to it. Adding the Scope now will save you a lot of time and heartache in the future.

5. Xml and Robots.txt pages

In order to efficiently begin marketing your website, Kentico provides Web Parts so you can create your Sitemap (HTML and XML versions) and Robots.txt pages directly within the CMS itself. This will give you full control over how you want to keep these files updated and properly maintained.

Using this pre-launch checklist for a successful start will help your Kentico website take off and rocket past competing websites that don’t have all of these bases covered.